This extreme action was taken when employees were served with sudden, without any notice, the termination letters today Morning.
What’s surprising here is that employees were not notified beforehand, thus giving this step a rather undignified notion on part of an organization as huge as Mobilink.
More staff is to see the doors in coming days.
This was first round of eliminating resources from the company since Vimpelcom took over the parent group company “Orascom Telecom”.
It maybe recalled that Mobilink signed major network “Swap” & “Modernisation” agreements with vendors like “Huawei” and “Ericsson”. The scope of these agreements include installation of 3G compliant network. Beyond modernisation, the vendors were also be responsible to ensure maintaining network KPIs, power commitment, fuelling services, level 1 & Level 2 maintenance and managed services.
Once contracts are fully in place, Mobilink, as part of group strategy, will outsource major technical activities, while in-house staff will, just be, carrying out level 1 maintenance on site intervention for core network, alarm monitoring and KPI (Key Performance Indicators) review.
While we aren’t sure yet but sources tell us that laid off employees will possibly be compensated as per international standards.
Mobilink is not the only Telecom company that has released its technical department, in fact, Telenor fired its entire department last year on similar grounds.
Shrinking opportunities for telecom professional are worsening, especially when Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) & and once giant, Nokia Siemens Network (NSN) are facing similar turmoil after loosing business.
Not to forget companies like Motorola and Nortel Networks have already wrapped up their businesses in the country.
By letting people go and find other options, these vendors are also adding unemployed skilled engineers in society. Such downsizing, (often termed as Right-Sizing by executives) is overloading the pool of unemployed resources in the country.
At this stage Government of Pakistan (through MOITT) and PTA must jump in, to devise ‘rules of game’, otherwise this brutal way for firing people will become a precedence for other telcos and the country would be flooded with several hundreds of highly skilled unemployed future-less telecom engineers.
Government should also take necessary measures to overcome power crisis, which adds up the OPEX of telecom companies by large and eventually causes such down-sizing.